In 1988 the Museum of London’s Department of Greater London Archaeology excavated a small site in Creffield Road, Acton, West London. It was located close to the site of a major find of Middle Palaeolithic material, made by John Allen Brown in 1885 and interpreted by him as a working floor. The find lay at the base of a layer of ‘brickearth’ overlying Lynch Hill Terrace gravel. Nearby excavations in 1974/5, directed by G de G Sieveking, failed to relocate this working floor, although a number of Middle Palaeolithic artefacts and a large concentration of flint artefacts typologically of later date were recovered from the brickearth layers.

The 1988 excavation included a detailed investigation of the geology of the site. It revealed a sequence of fluvial deposits overlying Lynch Hill Gravel, indicating that a braided stream system had existed in the area. Overlying the fluvial deposits was a series of reworked alluvial/ colluvial deposits, with a large loessic component in the upper portion. These were deposited by mass-movement under cold-climate conditions, probably during the Devensian. It is possible that the surface Allen Brown described as a working floor could have been an unconformity within the sequence of fluvial deposits, perhaps with an early Devensian date. The archaeological material from the 1988 excavations was all recovered from the upper sediments, and mirrored the material from the 1974/5 excavations; a single Levallois flake evidently transported within the sediments, and a number of artefacts of later date deposited after they had been laid down and distributed vertically within them by bioturbation. A Mesolithic date is indicated for this later material.

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